1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a process for fabricating a semiconductor device and, more particularly to a process for fabricating a Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (called hereunder, MOSFET)having a submicron channel length.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, MOS transistors have been rapidly scaled down, involving shortened channel lengths thereof. This results in severe degradation of electrical characteristics of MOS transistors due to threshold voltage lowering and mobility degradation when the channel length becomes comparable to the source and drain regions depletion layer width. These effects are known as "short-channel degradation", and are a serious limitation for further device scaling.
Some approaches for overcoming the above effects are known. One of these approaches adopts the so-called "halo" or "pocket" deep implantation to provide highly doped regions 23 and 24 near the respective junctions of source 21 and drain 22 of a MOS transistor 20, as shown in FIG. 2 (C. F. Codella and S Ogura, "Halo doping effects in submicron DI-LDD device design", IEDM Tech. Dig. (1985), 230). However, the depth and lateral spread of this implantation may be limited in sub-half micrometer channel length transistors, and in addition, a higher doping concentration at the drain junction increases the junction parasitic capacitance, degrading device speed.
Another approach uses oblique rotating ion implantation to form a non-uniformly doped channel of a MOS transistor 30, as shown in FIG. 3 (Y. Okumura, et al.: "A Novel Source-to-Drain Nonuniformly doped Channel (NUDC) MOSFET for high current drivability and threshold voltage controllability", IEDM Tech. Dig. (1990), 391). According to this technique, the doping concentration is higher near the source and drain, which reduces the widening of the depletion region, and at the same time, the doping concentration in the middle of the channel is reduced to improve the carrier mobility. The limitation of this technique is that in order to penetrate about 1/3 of the channel length, a relatively large implantation angle (Q) and a relatively high energy are required. This results in: [i) higher concentration at the drain junction, degrading device speed; and (ii) difficult control of the channel middle region width, especially in sub-half micrometer devices.